Number of contributors feels incredibly low for 10k stars and 1.6k forks

[RollingStar]

I had kind of taken it for granted that this is a niche project. But the star count suggests it's more beloved than I realized.

https://github.com/beetbox/beets/graphs/contributors

Possibilities:

1. There are barriers to contributing pull requests. Either in code complexity or meta-issues (writing tests, getting consensus on features, etc.)
2. My assumption is wrong, and it's normal to have <100 contributors a year for 10k stars
3. Most people using beets have no need for new features, bug fixes, etc. They're happy with how it is. (I suspect beets is heavily used in automated workflows. I see it mentioned in such contexts occasionally.)

I can speak to 1 a bit. I have little formal Computer Science background so it's been a long road to get anywhere good enough for meaty beets changes. Even going from "music fan" to "first code change" was a challenge, though not unique to beets at all. The architecture is more complicated than many apps, but beets does more things than most apps. I raised the issue of a dev guide here.

Adrian has spoken about how busy he is and the desire for a core team. The core team probably should/will come from the existing userbase already writing commits. For smaller bug fixes and "nice to have" features, I think we should be branching outwards to new members. Rather than trying to make existing members contribute 2-10x what they're doing now. That might not be sustainable.

My idea for branching out is to lower the bar for "getting something cool by using beets". Give people a reason to use it and hope that 1% of those people are motivated to contribute.